To be president takes enormous ambition. Lani Hay, a hugely successful businesswoman and navy veteran, definitely has that. The question is: Is it enough?

Lani Hay had mentioned it to me before, that she has a "life line" mapping out her path to the presidency of the United States. Daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, former naval intelligence officer, founder of Lanmark Technology, a small defense contractor that she's grown from a solo operation to a $40 million business with 200 employees in just nine years, and—not as incidentally as you might think—owner of a mane of hair that rivals Kim Kardashian's in its inky black glossiness, Lani Hay wants to be president. Although "wants" is too mild a word—as a friend told me, "My 12-year-old daughter wants to be president." Hay, who is 37, plans on it.

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"Could I see your life line?" I ask a bit sheepishly.

"Oh yeah," she says, completely cool. "I always have it with me."

We're perched on stools in a Starbucks in Richmond, Virginia, where in a few months I'll accompany Hay on a private group tour of the Virginia governor's mansion that she won in an auction to "get some ideas for my future interior decorating." She'll crack a smile when she says this, but she'll be only half joking. Because right there on her typed life line, which is laid out like a page in an old-fashioned 8½" x 11" day planner, but with years, instead of times of day, running down the left-hand column, it says: "2018 Governor of VA." (President of the United States is on tap for 2024, and before that, vice president and the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention.) Also because Hay rarely does anything without an eye toward its impact on her future goals; she wouldn't make the two-hour drive to the governor's mansion from her home in Washington, DC, just for a fun day trip. And because Hay is a woman with very specific ideas about decorating—the Swarovski-crystal-encrusted toilet in her guest bathroom is a wonder to behold.

Hay says that she doesn't, of course, expect to follow the plan to the letter—it's more like a framework for her future. She started to plot her life on paper after graduating from the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1997 and realizing she'd "wasted" a lot of time there. "I didn't have an agenda for what I wanted; I didn't have a mentor who said, 'Hey, you should really think about going to jump school in the summer,' " she offers (though she did eventually learn to parachute out of a plane). And nobody told her that midshipmen could live in Spain or Germany and learn a language "in country," she says, deploying the military jargon that peppers her conversation.

Her rationale for broadcasting her ambition to become president—and she'll tell just about anyone who'll listen—sounds similar. "I'm not from a power family that's going to lay out a road map for me," she says, dressed in one of the fitted two-piece knit business suits she favors for work (St. John is her preferred label), this one navy with fat gold buttons. "I'm trying to figure it out as I go along." She's drawn on her new wealth to hold fundraisers at her home for, among others, Mark Warner, the senior senator from Virginia and former governor of the state, as well as Tim Kaine, another former governor, and, as of November 6, the state's other senator. She has informed both men about her plans, she says. "The more people who know what it is I want to do, and they see my proven track record of being a successful leader, whether it's in the military or business—I think they'll get behind me and want to help."

To further her political ambitions, she moved in 2007 from Northern Virginia to DC, ensconcing herself and her chihuahua in a modern concrete three-story, which, with its all-glass front covered inside by champagne-colored sheers, looks more like a foreign embassy than somebody's home. Which isn't accidental, since she bought it to host events as much as she did to live in. "I was a math major, not a poli-sci major," Hay says. "I realized that there's a way of how DC works that I wasn't understanding living in the suburbs. When I moved to the city, I took a PhD approach: I'm going to really learn what it means to be in politics. What does it mean to be a senator versus a congresswoman? I did that for about five years and came to an understanding that an executive-level position, like being governor, is more within my skill set."

Of course, why not? Listening to Hay can make your head spin. In a single sentence, she'll sound both stunningly confident and stunningly naive. One minute, you're thinking she's the most accomplished of businesswomen—winning countless awards for her work in a virtually all-male field; meeting with the deputy secretary of defense; traveling to Afghanistan to check on her staff of "math geeks," who use probability modeling to try to predict where IEDs might strike—and the next, you're thinking she's a girl who just wants to have fun.

"I'm not drunk enough for a hookup," she murmurs late one evening, texting madly as she stands in her front yard, wearing a short black dress and shoulder-grazing chandelier earrings, her hair done up in an I Dream of Jeannie fall. She's just come from a fundraiser she sponsored at the DC Ritz-Carlton for the Creative Coalition, a nonprofit that brings celebrities to the nation's capital to lobby for the entertainment industry and various social causes, and now, outside the after-party she's throwing at her place, she's apparently declining said hookup.

Twice divorced and on the lookout for husband number three, Hay keeps her curvaceous figure in shape with yoga and the occasional marathon—and she likes to flaunt the results during her off-hours, busting through the inside-the-Beltway style codes that make Michelle Obama's inauguration-night one-shoulder Jason Wu dress seem daring.

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Meeting men to "get serious with" is tough, Hay says—and spending her days almost exclusively among the opposite sex doesn't help. "I can't concentrate on who has a hot ass at work," she says, the implication being that she has more important things to do.

Hay is an example of a fascinatingly (and sadly, I'd say) rare type: an unabashedly ambitious female. It's become a truism that women, no matter how accomplished, consciously or unconsciously hide their loftiest aspirations, in part because they're smart. A fair amount of social science has shown that women are penalized for glowing too brightly in professional settings, for demanding raises and other rewards in the same direct fashion that many men do. One question about Hay is whether her blatant appeals are more likely to attract or offend the masses, not to mention the kingmakers whose anointment is a first step toward attaining political office. Another, perhaps more fundamental, question is: In her designs on the White House, is Hay delusional?

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When you talk to her political mentors/boosters/hired consultants about her chances to become the leader of the free world, or just of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the first thing they mention is her "wonderful story." Those are the words of Bob Gibson, who's the executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, which runs a well-regarded program to school would-be elected officials in Virginia policy that Hay attended last year.

Hay was born just weeks after her Vietnamese mother, grandmother, and 18 other family members left a refugee camp in Guam and piled into a two-bedroom townhouse in the Northern Virginia town of Manassas. A once-prosperous clan who ran an import-export business and had ties to the South Vietnamese military, they were among those airlifted out of Saigon by the U.S. government two days before the city fell to the North.

In Virginia, her mother became a "serial entrepreneur," Hay says, owning salons and day spas and selling real estate, and the family eventually managed to make a middle-class life for itself. Meanwhile, Lani went to public schools, earned good grades, played volleyball, and got the inspiration to go to Annapolis to become a navy flier from hometown heroes the Robinson brothers, one of whom, David, would go on to play in the NBA. (Conspicuously missing from her story is her father. Hay allows that he piqued her interest in flying by taking her and her older sister to air shows as girls, but otherwise her dad—"the only white person in the family"—is a bit of a cipher. He was working for the U.S. government in Vietnam, but she's not sure in what capacity and has never asked. Her parents divorced when she was 18, and she sees her father infrequently.)

Hay found out during her senior year at the Naval Academy that a bee allergy disqualified her from becoming a pilot, but she says she wasn't upset by the setback: "It opened up the intelligence community, which I found to be really intriguing. I knew that I'd still have an opportunity to serve." Among other postings, she spent time in Bahrain, where one of her tasks was to "scrub" Iraq—scan data from surveillance aircraft and other sources—for targets to bomb. (Hay says this is how she learned that the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was false. "There was nothing," she says. "It was empty.")

While enrolled in the College of William & Mary's MBA program (which she attended while also serving as a navy intelligence instructor), Hay hatched her company. Assigned to write a business plan, she began schooling herself in the Byzantine ways of federal contracting—it's less risky than other start-ups, she told Fortune magazine when she was selected as one of its 10 most powerful women entrepreneurs in 2009, because the U.S. government "is a client that will always be around and inevitably gets bigger"—and launched Lanmark soon after leaving active duty in 2002. The company now has a passel of federal contracts, among the largest and most prestigious of which involves sending math and intelligence experts to Afghanistan to draw on historical information about when, where, and how IEDs have detonated, to "lower the casualty count," Hay explains. A military commander might consult the data, for example, before deciding which route or gear will best protect his troops.

Hay's business success—she started with $6,000 in savings and credit card charges—solidified her intention to aim for president. On her life line, she had Lanmark hitting the $15 million mark in five years, so she "could get my dream house, put my kids through college, and have enough to live on for the rest of my life," but she easily beat her own goal. Then she talked to a fellow entrepreneur she'd befriended in DC whose company was on par with hers one year but worth $1 billion the next. "If he can do that," she recalls thinking, "why can't I be president?"

Investment banker Sallie Krawcheck talks about something she calls the Twitch, the way we—men and women alike—cringe when a woman gets too aggressive or critical (or, as Hanna Rosin put it in her excellent recent book, The End of Men, when she "unsheathes her sword"). We also twitch, I'd argue, when women sound too full, or sure, of themselves.

"Do you have any doubt about your ability to be president?" I ask Hay.

"No," she immediately replies.

Twitch.

"Have you ever seen Bill Clinton's Hope video?" Hay asks me, comparing the biographical "sizzle" video that she's planning for herself to the former president's.

Twitch.

I'm twitching madly, and I'm a woman who makes a point of calling myself "ambitious" in front of junior female colleagues, imagining that I'm helping to create a world in which women are as out with their big plans—and big talents—as men are. But I'm surely sending contradictory signals; otherwise I wouldn't have felt so awkward asking to see Hay's life line. Which just goes to show the level of instinctive resistance openly ambitious women face.

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And yet significant aspects of Hay's approach are recommended by those who contend that if women are to be fully represented in the highest echelons of business and politics, they must act with more "intentionality," as author Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, advises in No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. "Girls are now told they can be and do anything," she told ELLE in 2010, "but they're much less likely [than boys] to be taught that they should have a life plan that's intentional. Girls are socialized to be reactive; boys are socialized to be the askers, girls the askees."

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Psychiatrist Anna Fels argues much the same in her book, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives. "Women, more than men, need to actively imagine themselves into their futures," she writes, "because so little is mapped out for them at this historical moment." She theorizes that there are two motivations behind ambition: the need for mastery and the need for recognition, and they're deeply intertwined—no matter how much women may say things like Nancy Pelosi, who habitually attributes her ascent to become the first female Speaker of the House not to ambition (yick!) but to a deathbed promise she made to a friend. "Without an element of mastery, we have little control over our destiny," Fels says. "Without recognition [or the expectation of such], we feel isolated and, ultimately, demoralized."

Other commentators on female ambition urge women to stop acting as if all they've got going for them is perfect preparation. As Maine senator Susan Collins memorably put it, "A female officeholder once told me that to talk about international trade policy, a woman felt she needed a PhD. A man felt he was qualified if he drove a Honda." Collins wasn't talking about ambition merely for ambition's sake, but the willingness to take risks once you've achieved a degree of what Fels calls mastery. By this metric, the dudes don't have anything on Hay. One afternoon a former MBA classmate (who will remain anonymous because he's also a member of Seal Team 6, which killed Osama Bin Laden) stopped by Lanmark's headquarters for lunch, and the two got to reminiscing about how he'd asked her, long ago, whether she felt confident starting her own business. "I told him I didn't know what the fuck I was doing," Hay says, laughing.

That's the kind of faux-humble line the powerful like to toss off, but in Hay's case, I take her at her word. Not that I question her knowledge of military intelligence, or that she diligently applied herself in the MBA program, but she's definitely more hare than tortoise—or maybe it's more bull in a china shop.

But then, those who roam the political savanna are different beasts than most of us. "Sometime in my sixteenth year, I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official," Bill Clinton wrote in his autobiography, My Life. "I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service."

Closer to home for Hay is the story of Mark Warner, who came from a modest background but earned millions as a tech entrepreneur before taking Virginia politics by storm: In college, at George Washington University, he worked as a Senate intern, and when his parents came to visit, he got them two tickets to the White House. Asked by his father why he didn't get one for himself, Warner replied, "I'll see the White House when I'm president."

As we drive home from our visit to the governor's mansion in Hay's BMW X5 SUV (American made, she assures me), I ask her why she wants to be president and what she'd do were the position hers. She first references Ted Kennedy's notorious pause when newscaster Roger Mudd asked him that question in 1979. Hay tells me she searched out the exchange on YouTube, though apparently it has yet to inspire her to craft a forceful answer. "For me it's such a heavy question," she begins. "And it's got multiple layers—at a very high level, it's the most honorable form of public service." She muses about all the sacrifices you have to make and the appalling lack of privacy "with all the social media and everyone up your skirt." Then, "I really think it's time for a woman to be a president." Hillary's loss was "heartbreaking…. At what point are we going to let women into that last old boys' club?" (Clinton, by the way, assiduously avoided this line of argument—vote for me because we gals deserve it!)

While Hay's one-liners about women's rights can sound canned, sex discrimination, particularly in the military, is a topic about which she displays genuine passion. Somewhat reluctantly, she tells me that she was sexually harassed at the Naval Academy, turning her senior year into an emotional endurance contest. An underclassman spread a rumor that she was giving him oral sex in exchange for use of his printer. She complained to her superior, who brushed her off: "You should be flattered that he has a crush on you," he told her. Infuriated, she wrote a letter to the highest level of command protesting her treatment, the result of which was that she was "watched like a hawk" and given demerits for the slightest infractions. She persevered, though she still marvels at the misogyny. "I remember thinking, Gosh, in high school we had a female valedictorian, and the guys didn't despise her. Some of the [Annapolis] guys, they had this hatred, thinking that women didn't belong there." Still, she says, the opportunities the Naval Academy afforded her to see the world, build a career, and learn how to lead were worth it: "I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

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As for the other layers of Hay's desire to become president, "Well, there's the basic level of love for the country," she says, "and love for what the country has provided my family." The most important thing to her, as a matter of domestic and foreign policy, is the national debt, and in that area she says she allies with the Republican agenda of slashing federal spending.

Does that mean, then, that she opposed Obama's economic stimulus act? Earlier, she'd been bemoaning its too-onerous reporting requirements, with which she's familiar because Lanmark got a chunk of stimulus money to hire extra staff at a foreign-service-officer school whose facilities the company runs. Now she backtracks, but not because she's against such government spending on principle. "I guess I'd have to understand where the money was spent—was it used to do things that were absolutely needed?" Hay wonders out loud. "I don't know."

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At another point she complains, "It's always the same thing: Tax the rich, tax the small businesses. When are they going to stop taxing the engine?" So she's not a fan of the Buffett tax, I assume.

"You know," she says, "I don't know the details of that…."

I try to explain billionaire Warren Buffett's campaign to change federal law to tax capital gains (acquired through investments) at a higher rate, so that, famously, he can't get away with paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Hay replies, "I'm for a flat tax."

Oh. That's another Republican idea, a chestnut that hasn't gotten much play recently. So you think it's fair, I go on, that people whose housing costs, for instance, comprise a much higher portion of their income than yours or mine pay the same tax rate as we do?

"I could be swayed to change my position with more information," she says.

And don't even ask about Obama's health-care reform: "I haven't wrapped my head around what it means," Hay says. "I kind of got lost when it went to the Supreme Court. I haven't picked up on what the aftermath of that was."

"Well, any day now we'll find out what the Supreme Court rules," I say. It's June 21, a week before the justices will issue their 5–4 ruling affirming the key components of Obamacare.

"Really?" Hay asks. "They haven't made a decision yet?"

By the time we pull into Hay's driveway, I think I know how Katie Couric felt when Sarah Palin explained how Alaska's proximity to Russia gave her foreign-policy cred: flabbergasted and kind of mean. I wasn't trying to play gotcha. Hay has time to learn, of course. How conversant was George W. Bush in the issues of the day in his midthirties? Granted, a young Bush likely sounded savvier than Hay by virtue of sitting around the Kennebunkport dinner table—but then he didn't have to build a career, never mind a fortune, for himself from scratch. "My first priority has been my business," Hay explains, to the extent that she even feels compelled to excuse her gaps in knowledge.

Tim Kaine, who's been encouraging Hay in her political aspirations, thinks government works best when people with diverse backgrounds are involved. "The general rule is, the most successful people in politics have an expertise other than politics," he says, citing the field's need for "teachers and policemen," as well as business leaders and military vets like Hay. "The more skills we add to the mix, the better off we are."

You could make the case, in fact, that Hay is taking the quintessential Gen Y approach to getting what she wants: Start with image—add substance later. She has a political logo. She's hired a branding consultant whose accounts typically involve selling tennis shoes and the like. She's been working with Lanmark's creative director, a former producer of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, on a reality show that, Hay says, "reflects my values." The idea behind Frogwomen, the "proof of concept" video for which she's been shopping around Hollywood, is to show ordinary women (read, Hay's entourage: "my hairdresser, my fertility nurse," etc.) undergoing grueling, Navy Seal–like training. Her hope is to help persuade the Defense Department to lift its rule banning women from joining elite special-forces units—and to entertain.

"Timing is everything in politics," Hay says. "I want to have all the branding stuff in place, so when the opportunity comes, I won't have to worry about it."

She's also taken more conventional steps to lay the groundwork for a political career. With the guidance of feisty, respected DC philanthropist and Democratic donor Edie Fraser, Hay in 2007 began making political contributions to seed a network of potential supporters. In addition to giving to Warner and Kaine, she raised roughly $150,000 for Clinton's presidential campaign and has since contributed to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and to a clutch of female senators, among others.

Calling her an "A student," Fraser believes Hay has the ability to become policy proficient, as does the Sorensen Institute's Gibson, who says the task before her now is to build her "civic résumé." They both think she needs to start with a legislative job rather than lieutenant governor, as she'd originally hoped, and Hay herself seems to have come to that realization too. (She bought a house in the Manassas area in 2011, so she'd be eligible to run for office in Virginia.)

Neither Fraser nor Gibson seem fazed by Hay's openness in discussing the ultimate prize. "It's something people tend to admire, someone who can be forthright and blunt at times," Gibson says. "It's refreshing."

He's got a point. The year before attending Sorensen's political boot-camp, Hay took part in a similar one called Lead Virginia, in which students travel the state a weekend a month to get up to speed on each region's pressing matters. Lead Virginia's staff chided her, she says, for suggesting to a state senator from the Bible Belt that farmers decimated by the loss in tobacco-growing revenue should consider growing hemp. "I'm a solutions person," Hay says, "and I find a lot of times people just want to stay stuck in their problems, talk about how bad it is. For me to hear 'Oh, woe is me' stories from people who are supposed to be in state leadership positions just doesn't sit well."

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(I got a gulpworthy dose of this shoot-from-the-hip quality at the Sorensen Institute's 2012 gala dinner, when a woman at our table told Hay that her husband was a Navy flyer. "Really?" Hay deadpanned. "Mine was an asshole." The woman visibly blanched: Her first husband, she said, had died during a nighttime training mission.)

As for the asshole, he was Hay's second husband, and the marriage lasted three and a half years before ending in 2010. All she wants to say about it is that she "didn't know the person" she was marrying, that she "rushed into it." Hay is more forthcoming about her first husband, whom she married right after she graduated from the Naval Academy. They grew apart because of differences in ambition; things came to a head when she was stationed in Hawaii, where, instead of pursuing a master's degree as he'd promised, he developed a passion for surfing.

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Romance is the "one area I haven't figured out yet," she laments, so lately she's tried to apply some principles from her work. "Just making sure I do market research and analysis. You know, treat it like—I don't want to say something as crass as a business transaction, but my time is very valuable, and I want to make sure I'm spending it with a quality person, just like I wouldn't waste my time with a business deal that wasn't going anywhere." Hay really wants children—her life line lists "Baby 1" in 2014—so she has 14 eggs on ice (hence, her friend the fertility nurse) in case she doesn't find Mr. Right in time. Her political mentors have warned her, she acknowledges, about doing "too many things that make me more of an outlier than I already am," but she says she's seen how having kids has transformed the lives of so many of her girlfriends.

When I ask Gibson whether Virginia, which has never had a female governor, is ready for a twice-married single mother whose progeny are the product of frozen eggs and a sperm donor, he says, "It may be a less traditional path, but how many women who have graduated from the Naval Academy have gone on to the career that she has?" Then he adds, "Maybe she'll get married. You can't rule it out."

Maybe, but that gets back to what's refreshing about Hay. Despite all her exhaustive planning, she doesn't strive for the vanilla-pudding virtue of the twentysomethings I met at Yale Law School, for example. (I was there on a journalism fellowship.) More than once I heard a classmate say, with a straight face, that he wasn't smoking pot or engaging in some other questionable activity because "it won't look good when I run for office."

The fullness of who Hay is hasn't stopped spurting out. Or rather, she hasn't stopped herself from spurting. There's her BeDazzled toilet, which her sometime publicist Jessica Hoy says she begged her not to install: "I have to take governors in there!" Hay waved her off. A friend started a business crystal-coating everything imaginable, and she wanted some of his handiwork in her place, she explains. DC wags also love to gossip about the stripper pole Hay has in her basement, which she installed because yet another entrepreneurial friend was selling them during the pole-dancing fitness craze. And when I joined her and two of her friends on a Navy Seals trip she won at a charity auction—we drove ATVs through the California desert, jumped out of a plane, and shot at life-size paper targets of "jihadist" fighters—she didn't hesitate to bring me along for the late-night hot tub, where we drank cheap wine and I got to glimpse the tattoo at the base of her spine: balance, compassion, love.

At times I find myself wondering whether Hay's swan dive into girlishness in her off-hours (her favorite designer is the maestro of outrageous glitz, Roberto Cavalli) isn't a way to emphatically escape the no-nonsense, tough demeanor required to function as a relatively young female boss in a predominantly male environment. This toggling between femme and macho can also be a survival strategy for female soldiers like Hay. Act too rough, and you're a dyke or poaching on male prerogatives; act too ladylike, and you're the reason the military didn't want women in the first place: too weak.

On the Navy Seals trip, Katy Young, one of Hay's Annapolis friends, who's now a mother of two, gave a lesson in this method when we met the cocky but utterly charming Seals assigned to teach us to drive the vehicles used to traverse Afghanistan's unforgiving terrain. The leader introduced himself by offering that he'd never taken women out before, to which Young replied, "We'll pop your cherry!" Manly eyebrows arched in surprise, then chiseled features relaxed: We'd passed the cool test.

All this raises the question of whether Hay's persona as a buttoned-up businesswoman by day and Kardashian by night would fly for a female president. It's already attracted negative notice in certain female DC power circles. When I ask one detractor who scoffs that Hay isn't the real thing to explain, she sends me a picture that "says it all." Into my inbox pops a snapshot of Hay in a low-cut turquoise dress, her two miniature poodles (bought for extra company after her second divorce) in her arms, framing her impressive cleavage.

Fels calls figuring out how to comport oneself as a powerful woman a "new art." While she noted in her book that there hasn't been a "female equivalent of the former presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a self-proclaimed Elvis wannabe, wiggling his hips and playing a mean saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show," she says she's not sure what the future holds for her gender. (Yes, Clinton was also a policy genius, but that's not the point here.) "In my lifetime, women started out in these horrible power suits, trying to find their way. Margaret Thatcher completely based her look on Queen Elizabeth II: the pearls, the hat, the gloves." But more recently, she says, there's "Sarah Palin and all her odd sexiness." Who knows, Fels says, whether a "rawly authentic" quality such as Hay possesses might end up working to her advantage?

For all her flamboyance and idiosyncrasies—at least for a politician—perhaps what's most disconcerting about Hay is her seeming lack of ideological conviction. She held an event at her house for Sarah Palin because "John Warner asked me to; I don't say no to him." (He wrote her recommendation to get into the Naval Academy.) Before throwing her support behind Hillary in 2008, she gave $1,000 to Rudy Giuliani, unsure which party she wanted to join. The main reason she seems to have opted for the Democrats is the party's support for women's rights (though her brand consultant assures me she isn't a "female chauvinist"). She complains about how Virginia's Republican attorney general has covered the bare breast of the goddess on the state seal, about the state legislature's widely ridiculed (and ultimately abandoned) effort to require vaginal ultrasounds before abortions. "I've always been pro-choice across the board," Hay says. "I don't want the government in my vagina, period."

Minus the female-empowerment agenda, the politician she reminds me of most rhetorically is Mitt Romney. (I don't buy his right-wing conversion.) "My company has given me such a grounded sense of self-confidence that I can really do anything I set my mind to," Hay says. "It's a very complex, highly regulated business that I've created and run." Yes, but, again—why is she so driven to become president? "Because I see that there are so many things that need to get fixed and changed. And I'm a natural fix-it person. I'm a solution architect."

She could be a pragmatic centrist, that dying breed not bound by the dogma of either party. But still, doesn't a politician need to know what she stands for, whose interests she finds most pressing, to decide which problems need solutions in the first place? Is it a problem, for instance, that income inequality in the U.S. is among the highest in the developed world? Is racial diversity in the nation's universities an outdated goal?

Put differently, is it enough to be president if your main credential is the certainty that you'd be a top-notch decider-in-chief? One answer is that conviction took Romney pretty far. Another answer is: For a self-made woman, maybe substance, or idealism, doesn't have to precede personal ambition (or sometimes can't). Perhaps the order can be switched, and one's passionate core can be discovered. According to her life line, Hay has 10 years to look.